Author: Sandhya Jain
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: August 3, 2010
URL: http://www.dailypioneer.com/273487/A-conspiracy-unravels.html
Was the alleged rape of a nun, following the
assassination of Swami Laxmanananda Saraswati and four sanyasis in Kandhamal
on Krishna Janmasthami, August 23, 2008, an afterthought by missionaries targeted
by enraged Hindus? Was it a planned vengeance, aimed at garnering the international
spotlight and forcing Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik to break his alliance
with the BJP, which empathised with the Vishwa Hindu Parishad's anger at the
murder of its octogenarian leader?
The questions are legitimate given Fr Thomas
Chellan's admission in court on July 26 that he did not report the alleged
rape of the nun when filing the first information report with the police on
August 26, 2008. The Baliguda Catholic Church pastor, a key witness in the
case, admitted during cross-examination before Cuttack district and sessions
judge Bira Kishore Mishra that he had not mentioned the alleged rape in the
FIR filed a day after the incident is said to have occurred. His complaint
caused the arrest of 23 people.
The alleged rape of the 29-year-old nun from
Sambalpur is said to have occurred on August 25 in Kandhamal district, a day
after agitated Hindus went on the rampage to protest the gunning down of Swami
Laxmanananda and his disciple-monks in the precincts of his own ashram. Swami
Laxmanananda had previously escaped several attempts on his life and had received
death threats from missionaries infuriated by his anti-conversion activities.
The nun worked at Divyajyoti Pastoral Centre
at K Nugaon block. She was reportedly dragged out of a retired head clerk's
house by 40-odd armed men who chanted "Bharat Mata ki Jai," taken
to the office of an NGO, Jan Vikash, where one man allegedly raped her. At
that time, 12 policemen of the Odisha State Armed Police were camping in a
school in front of the NGO's office. The nun identified the main accused as
Santosh Patnaik, alias Mitu.
Fr Chellan was reportedly beaten and paraded
half-naked on the road the same day. He identified two accused in court as
being part of the mob that attacked his church, but had failed to identify
either man during the test identification parade held at Choudwar jail last
year. The case was initially committed to a fast-track court in Kandhamal
that was trying all riot cases, but was transferred to a sessions court in
Cuttack after the nun petitioned that she felt unsafe in Kandhamal. (This
is now the standard refrain in all anti-Hindu cases; Gujarat's former Minister
Amit Shah is only the latest victim.)
Interestingly, Dr Chotray Marandia, who first
treated the nun after the alleged assault-cum-rape, testified on August 28
that she had only complained of swelling on her face. "I only treated
the swelling on her face and she did not complain of anything else,"
he replied when asked by defence lawyers about other injuries on her body.
So we have no evidence of rape.
The then block development officer, Mr BB
Mishra, testified that he had accompanied the nun and priest to the local
police station to file their complaint about the mob attack. Both thus had
full official protection while filing the complaint, and cannot claim that
the police did not record the FIR properly, or that the rape charge was ignored
by the police. These testimonies are damning.
That the rape is most likely a fabrication
can be seen from the nervousness of the prosecution. Earlier, her lawyers
had sought a month's time for the nun to appear before the court. This is
suspicious to say the least, but fits in with the church's hiding the nun
from the local people and producing a veiled woman with a thick Malayalam
accent at a Press conference in Delhi. Interestingly, last Saturday the nun
failed to identify the key accused at a test identification parade.
The Church-prosecution embarrassment has been
aggravated by the June 12 arrest of Pandit Bishimajhi for allegedly plotting
to kill the nun and priest to prevent them from testifying against the mob.
It was alleged that Bishimajhi led several mob attacks, one of which stripped
and paraded the nun and Fr Chellan, and is thus complicit in the fast-disintegrating
rape case.
It may be appropriate to put the anti-missionary
violence in context. The Kandhamal violence erupted after the murder of Swami
Laxmanananda, whose tireless efforts to uplift the tribal communities and
protect their religion and culture against aggressive proselytisation infuriated
the evangelists and Maoist goons (mostly converts). The Swami was severely
injured in an attack on Christmas eve in 2007, and had then accused a Congress
MP and World Vision chief for the attack. He alleged a nexus between Maoist
terrorists and missionaries; which is why when Maoists claimed responsibility
for the killings, public ire was directed at the missionaries. Certainly the
murders had a purely religious motivation; Odisha has in recent years seen
an influx of rich American Baptists for soul-harvesting purposes.
Beginning on December 26, 1970, Swami Laxmanananda
was attacked eight times before he was finally struck down by AK-47-wielding
assailants in 2008, according to the fact-finding commission chaired by Additional
Advocate-General of Rajasthan, GS Gill. Soon after the multiple murders in
the ashram, the State police arrested World Vision employee Pradesh Kumar
Das while escaping from the district. Later, two men, Vikram Digal and William
Digal, were arrested from the house of a local militant Christian, Lal Digal,
at Nugaon; they admitted having joined a group of 28 assailants. Then, in
July 2009, a Maoist couple, Surendra Vekwara and Ruby, also allegedly involved
in the killings, surrendered to the Odisha Police. One does not know how the
State Government intends to prosecute the cases against these persons, especially
as the sensational rape case is silently falling apart.
However, as I have previously argued, the
murder of Swami Laxmanananda closely resembles the murder of Swami Shanti
Kaliji Maharaj in Tripura in August 2000. The latter was also shot in his
own ashram by gun-wielding goons after several dire warnings against his anti-conversion
activities in the tribal belt were ignored. Swami Laxmanananda's murder prompted
Biju Janata Dal MP Tathagata Satpathy to insist that there was an urgent need
for an anti-conversion legislation as aggressive proselytisation was hurting
the social fabric.
Swami Laxmanananda Saraswati had, just before
his murder, demanded a national debate on conversions and an end to the foreign
funding of NGOs. This is an urgent imperative.
